Night Sessions, The (3 page)

“Ah,” said Campbell. “I beg your pardon.”

It had been on the tip of his tongue to say:
We don't call them the Faith Wars
, but to indulge that political correction to this man's artificial face would have been unforgivable. The man looked no older than Campbell himself, his synthetic face showing the age he'd been when its original had been destroyed.

The technology that could give robots an almost, but not quite, human appearance, and the technology that could give a mutilated human being a functionally and cosmetically almost perfect prosthesis were the same. Campbell wasn't even sure which had been adapted for the other purpose—they'd both come out of the surge of technological innovation—and desperate necessity—after the Oil Wars. Both applications were now obsolete—no one manufactured humanoid robots any more, for reasons that Campbell was painfully aware of, and organ and tissue regeneration could now repair every injury short of cortical destruction. He was too disconcerted by his mistake to query why Graham Orr had not chosen that option, but he hardly needed to. Tissue regeneration involved the use of embryonic stem cells, which for true Christians (and Catholics) was no less than murder.

Orr shrugged. “It's a mistake I rely on, sometimes,” he said. “And it's not entirely a mistake.” He turned his head and parted his hair at the side, revealing a crude gash-and-repair job on the uncannily precise prosthetic scalp. “I share my skull with an old comrade. My robot partner. His brain chip is sitting behind my ear. He's the one who heard your sermons first, via the robots.”

Campbell saw the cliffs sway. He closed his eyes for a moment.

“The robots?” he said. “
My
robots? They share what I say to them with
other robots
?”

Orr nodded. “And my friend in my head shared it with me, and I shared it with John Livingston.”

“And I,” said Livingston, “showed the recordings to the brethren here, and we decided to meet you and be sure of you before we shared them with the congregation.”

Campbell had a lot of questions on his mind, but the one that came to his voice was: “Why? Why do you want to show my discourses to your congregation?”

Livingston sighed. “It's not as if we are spoiled for choice in hearing the Word preached, John Richard. We don't even have an ordained minister. I am just the chair of the Kirk Session. As elders we can all teach, and preach, and we have the great works of the past to study, but we have found no one who speaks to us in the world of modern, compromised, backsliding so-called Christianity, except you. Finding someone who is so sound and sincere as you are is a blessing indeed.”

“But,” protested Campbell, “surely in all the world there are qualified ministers whose sermons you can listen to? And here in Scotland, of all places, there must be a remnant!”

Livingston looked him square in the eye. “The Churches here have all compromised!” he cried. “Here, and everywhere!” His voice took on a sing-song tone as he continued. “Compromises, compromises, compromises! With the secular state, with the Papists, with the enthusiasts and Congregationalists and modernists and dispensationalists, and with”—here his voice took on a particular vehemence—“the
sectarians
. There is only one congregation left of the one true covenanted reformed Church of Scotland, and that is us. We have no ordained minister, no student for the ministry, no synod or assembly. We have only our members, our adherents, and this Kirk Session. We are the remnant.”

One by one, the men shook hands with Campbell again, and then left, trekking out of the quarry in different directions. Graham Orr disappeared into the scrub as suddenly as he'd arrived, without another word. Campbell was left alone in the middle of the quarry under the now noonday sun, with a head full of questions unanswered and unasked. The sun had moved the wrong way in the sky. His brain felt like it was running too many applications at once. He found himself wondering if the robots ever felt the same. It was something he should know. He knew more self-aware humanoid robots, more intimately, than anyone else in the world. Perhaps some veteran systems engineers at Sony knew more
about
such robots than he did, but Campbell was fairly sure that no one else knew so many robots personally. It had been a surprise that they could still surprise him.

The elders of the Free Congregation had surprised him too. He'd expected, at a minimum, an invitation to lunch at someone's house. He'd looked forward, on the flight across, to attending the Congregation's church services and prayer meetings. He had been isolated too long from the fellowship of other believers. But after welcoming him to their brotherhood and assuring him that they looked forward to a long and fruitful association, and to seeing and hearing his discourses relayed from the eyes of robots in Waimangu to a television screen in front of the congregation, the elders had shown an almost indecent haste to depart. They'd warned him against contacting them, urged him to make good use of the week he had in Edinburgh before his return flight by visiting the many historic Reformation and Covenanting sites in the city and its environs, wished him all the blessings and a safe return home—and said goodbye.

It all seemed very strange, and not a little disquieting. But, Campbell reminded himself as he trudged across the floor of the quarry, dreading the climb back to the top, they'd already been more than generous with their hospitality. They'd paid his return fare and his hotel bill. And, more significantly, they had good reason not to see him again: they'd already satisfied themselves on his spiritual soundness—for which he was grateful, having often doubted it himself—and in this land, unlike his own, real and even nominal Christians lived under the shadow of an official disapproval that amounted, almost, to persecution.

Well, he decided as he began the slow and perilous upward scramble, he would indeed make good use of his time. He would spend his week in Edinburgh seeing what life was really like in a state that had been through the Great Rejection.

Campbell walked along George IV Bridge as far as the side of the National Museum, turned around and walked back as far as the National Library, turned again through the crowd on the pavement and walked back and hesitated for the third time at the steps of the club. The building's spire and arched doorway were the only remaining evidence that it had ever been a church. The front was plastered with posters for Festival and Fringe shows, sample loops flickering, tinny laughter and applause clashing; and with a big static advertisement for this evening's gig. He walked past the building again, then doubled back, pushing through the throng. He was going in. He had to see for himself. It was a duty. He had often condemned depravity, but he'd never seen it close up. Far from home, he now had a chance to do so without setting a bad example. He would see it for himself and walk out, never to enter such a den of iniquity again but confident that he had its measure.

This was his fourth night in Edinburgh. His first day, after he'd met the elders, had been a complete washout and write-off. He'd crashed out on his hotel bed, woken around midnight, gone out hungry and had dinner at an all-night noodle shop behind the Gazprom tower. Then he'd crashed again, waking mid-morning as the cleaning robot nudged the door.

His conclusion from the next three days of wandering around was that the streets of Edinburgh showed the benefits and drawbacks not of secular republicanism but of whopping military defeat. Campbell could see more clearly than ever why people in Britain, the US, and their former allies used the expression “the Faith Wars” for what everyone else referred to as the Oil Wars. Calling the catastrophes of the first two decades of the century the Faith Wars was the only way the former coalition countries could kid themselves they had won. They'd certainly defeated militant Islam, with secular republics now implanted throughout the Middle East. The Israel–Palestine issue could be regarded as solved, at least until the radiation dropped to a level that made the territory worth fighting over again.

In every other respect, the US and the UK had been defeated: armies destroyed, economies bankrupted, the region they'd fought to dominate now preferring to do business with the energy-hungry rising powers of their competitors. All they'd got out of the whole mess was the Oil for Blood Programme, which funded generous benefits for coalition war veterans. The main internal political consequence was the Great Rejection, in which the religious factions who'd pushed for the war had had the unwelcome experience of seeing a nasty gleam in the eyes of the returning veterans, a little glint that said:
You're next!

But the later and longer consequences of that defeat were, Campbell now thought, far more profound. The UK had depended on US military dominance, and on its own partnership in that, to live off oil, arms deals and finance while letting its manufacturing and agriculture go hang. The loss of this privileged position had forced its successor states to fend for themselves, just as it had in the United States. The political consequences in Britain had been less drastic than the US civil war, but the industrial results were manifest everywhere: in the fragrant steam from the pavement stalls hawking late-night snacks to the Festival crowds, in the beetle-wing carapaces of the compressed-air cars hissing past on the wet street, in the whizz of bicycles weaving between them, in the neon signs on the new buildings that rose high in the gaps between the old, and in the quiet spiralling descent of the night flights overhead.

Campbell reached the entrance of the Carthaginian. He wondered how many who went in would recognise the surely deliberate allusion to the building's name when it had been a church: St. Augustine's. The entrance way was dark, the booth a rectangle of light on the left. Knees quivering, eyes shifty, Campbell handed over his cash, accepted the ticket-stamp on the back of his hand, waved it at the scanner and stepped into the main hall.

The room was dimly lit, crowded with people bopping and noisy with people talking. Roving spotlights and low-intensity lasers showed up coils and drifts of smoke in the air. At the far end was a pulpit, in which a tall man dressed in black and wearing a white clerical collar worked his machines. To the left of the entrance was a bar, with a cluster of seats and tables, all taken. Campbell decided to walk once around the room, buy a drink at the bar, observe some more and walk out.

Everyone writhed and jived to the same rhythm, and when they spoke they leaned close to each other, some even speaking mouth to ear, but Campbell could hear no music. Now and then most of the faces Campbell could see turned at once, or reacted with widened or closed eyes or a laugh to some sight that he couldn't see. This suddenly made sense of a line on the sticker he'd seen advertising the show: “silent scene.” Campbell didn't have frames, but he did have a phone clip. He tabbed the device to ambient search. Even at low volume, the music sounded loud, harsh, heavy on the rhythm. He found his feet moving and shoulders swaying to its beat as he paced along the side of the room. There was something insidious about how the music caught him up, but at least (he told himself) it meant he didn't look as out of place as he felt.

He'd never been in a place like this. He'd never so much as been to a dance, not even at school. He'd had to learn some dance steps, but that had been PE. The church he'd been brought up in frowned on dancing. Until now, he'd never quite understood why. Besides the drinking and drug-taking, this was the most appalling display of lasciviousness he'd ever seen in the flesh. Couples and larger groups, some of them same-sex, writhing and rubbing against each other. Sweat beaded their faces and their many areas of bare skin. The air was thick with sweat, with perfumes, with pheromones, with tobacco and cannabis smoke and with wafts of more subtle drugs, of which even a sidestream sniff in passing could make his head feel strange for a moment, giving a jolt of disorientation like being jet lagged but far, far more pleasant.

The final touch of depravity was the clothes. Campbell had taken some care to check beforehand that the Carthaginian wasn't some kind of fetish club, and had confirmed that it wasn't, but the general attire struck him as a long way from normal. A large minority were, like himself, wearing smart casual—which, in the case of the women, meant immodestly scant. The rest were in various costumes: the men in foppish and flashy variants of Victorian or Edwardian suits, or odd combinations thereof; the women in dresses that admittedly didn't usually reveal a lot of skin but did show off and exaggerate curves, waists, breasts, necks and hips. Long dresses that might have been otherwise modest were given a gross, perverse, erotic charge by being made of shiny black or red PVC or even leather. Some of the styles—to say nothing of elective somatic modifications such as long canine teeth—plainly alluded to dark forces: witchcraft, vampirism, Satanism! There were other outfits that would have looked sweet on little girls, but to see grown women in frilly frocks of pink and white lace and ribbons and so on (and on—the whole mode was structured around excess to the point of parody) was as perverted as it was grotesque. He'd seen Japanese girls in Auckland wearing such costumes—“gothic lolita,” the style was called—and had thought it charming and harmless, but here it seemed too deliberate, too knowing in its disturbing effect. Campbell made his way past the desecrated pulpit and was just working his way around the corner of the crowd to head back up the other side to the bar for a much-needed cooling beer. As he moved he eyed a tall and lissom woman in one of those faux-innocent costumes dancing alone, a handbag made of similar fabrics at her Mary-Janes-shod feet.

She saw him looking. She smiled, and skipped back a little, as if to invite him to join her. And as she moved, Campbell realised—he wasn't quite sure why—that she wasn't a woman at all. She was a man in lolita drag.

Campbell smiled desperately, shook his head, and retreated as fast as he could towards the bar. He didn't look back. As he wove around the bodies in his path, he discovered that the cross-dresser he'd just spotted was not the only one in the crowd. It was as if he'd suddenly become sensitised to their presence and on three separate occasions, before he finally reached the bar, his noticing was itself noticed. He returned more desperate smiles to knowing looks. He dreaded to think that these people might think he was interested in them. Getting swallowed up in the crush around the bar was a relief. His voice shook a little as he ordered a bottle of lager.